Friday, July 8, 2016

The Bony Hand From The Grave

There is no shortage of bony hands from the grave
raising havoc with my emotions these days. Trying to make sense of recent
developments, I find myself revisiting the past for answers. There may not be
any answers, why, there might not even be any questions, but we are always
tempted to look. The human brain is a tool for identifying and solving
problems, after all.

For the last forty years of my mother’s life, I was a
dutiful and considerate son. Not, perhaps, the classic “loving” son, but there
you have it. More like “dutiful and considerate.” My parents lived on the
opposite coast, but we visited them often, and they came out to visit us. All
such meetings were pleasant. I spoke to my mother on the phone four or five
times every month, usually for about an hour each time. I told her that I loved
her, and I’m pretty sure that it all sounded quite sincere. We laughed and
gossiped on the phone. Sometimes after hanging up I’d shake my head and say to
my wife, “when I die, I’m going straight to heaven, because I was nice to
grandma.”

I had one hard and fast rule for those conversations:
there would be no talking about the old days.

Once in a while she’d let out some apparently innocent
remark that contained a kernel of discovered insight. For instance, the time
that the subject of men came up while my wife was on the phone and my mother said, “well, you know, men don’t want
sex after the age of forty or so.” I put that one together pretty quickly. That
would have been about the time when my mother torpedoed a big promotion for my
very ambitious father by refusing to move to Massachusetts. He never forgave
her for it. We saw little of him after that, and thereafter he treated us all
like strangers, unless there were people around. It was a de facto abandonment,
unnoticed by family or friends. He suffered no criticism for it. After my
mother’s comment it was apparent that he had never touched her again after
that.

Other little comments were harder to parse.

My father’s recent disinheritance of me has been a
serious blow, I’ll admit it. Of all of the possible reasons, one is that he may
have thought that enough money had been squandered on me already. For example, two years of
college tuition as a teenager during which time my index was 1.7 (yes, I know,
it seems impossible, but I managed it). Things like that. Examining this item I
recalled another of my mother’s throw-away lines.

In one of our conversations my mother strayed to the
old days in one of her sudden bursts of exculpation. The old, “you know how
much we loved you!” Before I could cut her off and return to the present, she
added, “why, your allowance was thirty dollars a week!”

That would be an amazing figure for the 1960s, and it
was certainly never true. I got ten dollars a week, plus a modest amount every
school day for transportation and lunch. That was already generous for the
times, but thirty dollars! I’d have remembered that if it were true. Thirty
dollars was enough for five record albums, two concerts or ball games, AND a
restaurant meal for two people. A dollar was a dollar back then. I let it go,
finding no significance in the claim at the time.

But after my father’s recent demonstration of his lack
of regard for me, I recalled that “thirty dollar” comment and saw the possible
significance of it. My mother never worked; she got a certain amount of money
to run the house. My father was very conservative with money, and watched his
budget very closely. It occurred to me that my mother may have wanted that
extra twenty dollars every week for something that was important to her. Like
whiskey, for instance.

My mother was an all-day drinker. She was a secret
drinker; you never saw the evidence. The owner of one of the town’s liquor
stores was a friend of hers from grammar school. He was kind enough to
personally deliver a week’s supply at a time in a cardboard box, picking up the
empties at the same time. Cheap stuff, Carstair’s rye. All of this bounty was
kept in the garage. Something like a hundred dollars a month would be hard to
explain, so I now suspect that she blamed it on my allowance. How she would
have explained why I needed so much money, I don’t know, but it would have been
easier than owning up to all of that drinking.

Neither of my parents were the type to ever actually
talk about anything. If that thirty dollar allowance was a device to hide her
whiskey budget, he would just have stewed about it in silence, believing the allowance
story. He’d never forget about it, either. He was never to type to forgive or
forget. He remembered ancient slights and disappointments clearly and bitterly all of his life.

Oh, the bony hand from the grave! What mischief we make
in the name of ego, and self-interest. Even the dead have damage left to do.

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About Me

Mr. C is: a reformed lawyer; a religious atheist; a useful "Handy Man;" an amateur social scientist; a beloved teacher; a well liked husband and father; Ambassador Emeritus from, and to, Planet X; a freelance professor; taxi driver to the stars (Joe DiMaggio and Ronald McDonald, both out of uniform); an excellent fire fighter; an enthusiastic but untalented musician; an experienced counselor; a top-notch disk jockey; an all around get-along-guy; a cunning linguist; a would-be lifestyle victim; a Masonic wannabe; a frequent reader; Professor Irwin Corey's Ph.D. adviser; an accomplished driver and motorcyclist; a famous rockologist; a reliable but indifferent bullshit detective; a poor speller; a proud United States Navy veteran (honorably discharged, barely); the Ayatollah of Ass-o-Hola; a drug legend; a Returned Peace Corps volunteer (Thailand); a generally charming man; nationally and internationally known from coast to coast; a legend in his own mind; a cultural-anthropological critic-at-large; an avenging angel who coolly bides his time; Soul Brother number 37; and a friend to the poor.